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The Regina Mom

Bernadette Wagner is an award-winning writer, a community activist and a singer. Her work has been published in newspapers, magazines, chapbooks and anthologies, on radio, television, CD and film, as well as online. Her first collection of poetry is available from Thistledown Press. This summer, she participated in an international women's recording project, A Widening Embrace, a collection of love songs for Earth and all its beings.

Wolf's research for that article became the book, The End of America, which documents "how open societies become closed societies." Her family's friends, Holocaust survivors, urged her to explore a few texts and the result was what she called a "blueprint" that has been adapted by several societies when making a shift from an open to a closed society. In the HuffPo piece she named 10 significant pieces of the blueprint and showed how they were at work in the USA at that time. To complement Nick Fillmore's work, TRM thought she'd finally share, in point form, what she discovered by placing Wolf's blueprint on Canada.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

- What's more terrifying to a parent than "child pornographers"? According to Vic Toews,The Regina Mom's opposition to Bill C-30 -- the Snoop and Spy bill -- means that she stands with "the child pornographers". How does that make a mother feel?

- More recently, as TRM has noted, on the eve of the Joint Energy Board's hearings on the Northern Gateway Pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver had choice words to describe those in opposition to the proposed pipeline. He painted "environmental and other radical groups" as those wanting to "block this opportunity to diversify our trade" regardlessof "the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth." The groups have a "radical ideological agenda" and will "exploit any loophole they can find" to"kill good projects" with"funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest."

- Forest Ethics supports its former employee in his allegations that the PMO is trying to "to silence and intimidate non profit organizations like ForestEthics, and the thousands of citizens and civil groups who, like us, are concerned about the direction this country is taking and are speaking out."

- Item #5 above identifies ForestEthics as a harassed citizens' group. It's former employee Andrew Frank maintains that he and other employees were told the PMO considered them to be enemies of the state.

- Recently, Canadians were advised that they may be placed on counter-terrorism watch lists if they are involved in "the promotion of various causes such as animal rights, white supremacy, environmentalism and anti-capitalism" activities.

10. Suspend the rule of law

- The conservative government has twice prorogued Parliament while critical debates and actions were underway that may have toppled the minority government.

As you can clearly see, dear Reader, Canada is active in every area of the blueprint Wolf found. And, up against Nick Fillmore's piece, there is definitely overlap. Canada is creeping towards closing down as a society, to becoming a fascist state.